Geist: The Sin-Eaters
| Geist: The Sin-Eaters | ||
|---|---|---|
| RPG published by White Wolf / CCP |
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| Rule System | Storytelling System | |
| Authors | Justin Achilli et al | |
| First Publication | 2009/2012/never? | |
A New World of Darkness RPG, much removed from but sharing themes with the Old World of Darkness's Wraith: The Oblivion and Mummy: The Resurrection. Once, you were human. And then you died. But in the underworld, you were approached by a Geist, the ghost of someone who's been dead so long they remember nothing about their mortal existence save for how they died. It offered you a bargain: go back to the land of the living, and get to live your life again but in return you gotta share your body with the Geist, who wants to experience life again. Naturally, you accepted. Now, you have a crazy-weird ghost sharing your body and you can talk to ghosts, but you have all sorts of awesome necromantic powers and you're not dead anymore.
Like Changeling: The Lost, GtSE is a case of White Wolf reversing the moodset of an OWoD gameline and thus managing to make a formerly unpopular idea popular. GtSE is a pretty welcome breath of fresh air in the NWoD since its themes are a huge difference to the general Wangsting that is so prevalent in the other game-lines. The tone is akin to a celebration of being alive, you cheated death so you may as well make the most of your new life before you kick the bucket for real. Think of the Mexican Day of the Dead or a New Orleans funeral and you won't be too far off.
It's one of the only two NWoD games pre-upgrade to the God Machine Chronicles where supernaturals had morality meters that actually managed to make them feel inhuman, instead of just being ridiculous hamhanded "tack on some extra race-appropriates 'sins' and call it done". The other was Werewolf: The Forsaken. Instead, the Bound (as the mortal part of the pair is called) has Synergy, which represents how well he/she works with the Geist. High Synergy means that the two halves work together effectively as a single individual, while low Synergy means that the mortal and the Geist no longer share the same goals. Additionally, if you die the Geist can bring you back but you'll take a major hit to your maximum Synergy in the process and you'll be forced to see the death of the person who was chosen to die in your place. At its lowest point, a Sin Eater may end up as one of the Wretched: a Geist and a mortal unable to share the same body, resulting first in a form of split personality (as the Geist and mortal struggle for control), ending with the Geist taking total control of its new meat-puppet.
While the premise works, nearly everything else doesn't. Only one book was ever made and it was rushed, to the degree it's parodied as Geist: the Underdeveloped and Unedited. It took three years for an errata'd "version 1.1" to be released and to no one's surprise, the game still has problems.